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There’s always something to howl about.

Category: Group Therapy (page 54 of 81)

April 4, 2010

SplendorQuest: Loving Cathleen…

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Cathleen and I have been on a love jag, lately, and I cannot begin to tell you how beneficial it’s been. A very simple idea: We added spending time alone together every day as a part of our goal-getting regimen. This turns out to have been an inspired idea, although I did not foresee that going in.

At some point I may write about this experience in detail, because there is a lot to be learned from it. As an example, consider this: If you want to end the day married, start the day married. No relationship can endure if you’re not doing anything to maintain it.

Teri and I have been talking about the same sorts of issues privately. Here’s a clip from email I wrote to her:

My wife is most beautiful when she’s all the way in love with me. Her features are very fine in the ground state — striking, as an old family friend would have it. But when those features are lit from within by her passions, then she is many orders of magnitude more enthralling. But it’s my job to earn that response from her — and I wish I could insist that I’ve earned that response every day. But there is no better incentive to staying on the path to Splendor than to marry someone you have to live up to.

We are a spiteful race. We wound all our treasures and treasure all our wounds. The SplendorQuest begins when you learn to think the other way — to focus on the world as you want it and not as you don’t want it. I wrote the essay shown below six years ago, and I wish I could say I’ve always lived up to it — all the way, every day. But I’m living up to it now better than I ever have before, and I can’t think of any reason why I should not be able to get better at loving my wife every day from now on.

What does this have to do with real estate? I hope you figure that out before a judge orders Read more

March 31, 2010

The sad story of how my wife, my family and my own life were devastated by the the unhappy effects of… sad stories…

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

At a certain age, you come to feel you’ve got a pretty tight bead on things. Wife, home, kids, job — everything just seems to come together. But then you find out that you’ve built your life on solid quicksand.

I’ll tell you my story. I don’t expect you to believe it, but it’s as true as last night’s TV news. You see, my whole world came crashing down around my ears because of a peril I had never thought to fear — until it was too late.

That peril? Anecdote addiction.

There I was, Joe Normal, watching re-runs and waiting for the game to come on, when my wife would relate some juicy bit of gossip she’d heard at the beauty parlor. Only to her it was more than that. Not just a story — a symptom, a syndrome.

First it was just an anecdote now and then. Always blown way out of proportion, but, hey, it’s just small-talk, right?

But then the stories started coming thick and fast. And they always seemed to be connected, somehow, in my loving wife’s fertile mind. And before you knew it, she started coming up with solutions, prescriptions, Rube Goldberg contraptions that, she thought, would ameliorate these imaginary syndromes.

Well, kitchen-table schemes are one thing, but, before long, she had graduated to movements, slogans, web sites, bogus academic studies buttressed by bogus academic conferences — the works.

And through all this turmoil, our mariage was going straight down the tubes. We went from home-cooked meals to frozen food, thus to leave her time for picketing and activism. The children learned to dress themselves from the dirty clothes hamper, their mother was so distracted. And as for our sex life — well, you do the math.

And yet through all this, I was in denial. “Where’s the harm?” I would ask myself. After all, the entire country is addicted to anecdotes. We’ll stare cold, hard facts right in the face, denying them utterly in preference to a carefully-crafted sob-story. If it weren’t for treacly anecdotes, there would be no news business, no entertainment industry, no politics in America.

And, of course, it was Read more

March 26, 2010

SplendorQuest: Redemption is egoism in action

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

This is clipped from a book I wrote in 1988 — a book I really need to write anew. It’s an epistolary novel, so the writing is kind of affected. I expect you can worry your way through it. “Madness,” as the term is used here, is an attempt to claim, as knowledge, a proposition the proponent knows in advance is invalid. –GSS

 
Redemption Is A Being Aware.

Redemption is finding Splendor in Rectitude. But much more importantly, Redemption Is Egoism In Action.

Egoism is the worship of the self by the self, all the time, for all time. Egoism Is A Being Aware of who he is and what he is doing and why — all the time. It is the pursuit always of values and never of disvalues, always of pleasure and never of pain, always of Truth and never of Madness. Egoism is the recognition that the fullest value of the self is realized through the fullest knowledge of the self.

Egoism is knowing and doing the good through time. It is a set of ideas, but ideas devoid of meaning if they are not put into practice. One can know Splendor by taking those actions one thinks are right. But one cannot know it by merely thinking about what is right, without acting upon it.

Redemption Is Egoism In Action, in the real deeds of your real life. By your self-loving actions, you redeem the errors of your past and make of them the achievements of your present and future.

It is not impossible to avoid doing this. Most people waste their whole lives trying to pretend that past errors need not be corrected. But neither is it possible to avoid the consequences of failing at redemption.

The future is open to change, but only by choice. Any person can take what he has and make of it what he would. If he is willing to make the effort. But he will not have his desires without fighting for them, without mothering them into being. The soul he creates for himself is the one he acts to create. If he fails to act for Read more

March 25, 2010

SplendorQuest: My plan to stage a graceful exit from life when the pursuit of Splendor has become impossible to me

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Under the wide and starry sky,
Dig the grave and let me lie.
Glad did I live and gladly die,
And I laid me down with a will.

This be the verse you grave for me:
‘Here he lies where he longed to be;
Home is the sailor, home from sea,
And the hunter home from the hill.’
      –Robert Louis Stevenson

This is important: Everything that matters in human life is to be found to the right of the zero on the number line. Zero is never greater than one, so concentrating on the zero or on negative values is necessarily anegoic — contrary to the true interests of the ego.

Can it sometimes be needful to attend to negative values? Yes. I speak of eradicating bugs all the time, since this is a useful metaphor for understanding the actual meaning and importance of disvalues. If my food is being devoured by ants, I need to to exterminate them. If there is a scorpion in my home (it happens here), I have to crush it — grind it to a gooey pulp. If a two-legged predator attempts to confiscate my wealth, I must be prepared to defend myself.

But this is not what human life is for. Some days are cloudy, but if I focus on the clouds rather than on the illimitable sunlight I can produce by using my mind to its fullest, I am throwing away the only life I will ever have in pursuit of nothing.

But: Even so: I can foresee that there will come a time in my life when the pursuit of Splendor will no longer be possible to me. Until lately, I thought the most likely scenario would be that the accumulated effects of aging would render me incompetent to continue to thrive at a fully-human state of being. Given the resurgence of Marxism under President Obama, it seems plausible to me, of late, that I might be imprisoned for my philosophical positions. And there is also the possibility that I might someday find myself unable to produce more wealth that I consume. The most likely cause of this would be the government’s progressive destruction of Read more

March 24, 2010

My kind of doctor: “I am responding to the situation created by this new law by exercising my right not to participate in any health insurance program.”

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

A letter from a sane doctor, posted at The Corner on NationalReview.com:

March 23, 2010

My Dear Patient,

As you must know, Congress has just passed extensive legislation governing health care delivery and insurance systems. Whether you agree with what it does or not, we are all now subject to this law and its sweeping changes.

I have always conducted my medical practice with my patient’s best interests as my first priority. Although not legally obliged to do so, I have routinely provided you with a receipt that has all the codes necessary to bill your own health insurance company for any reimbursement to which you are entitled. Until now, that insurance company was a free enterprise despite the fact that it was heavily regulated by state and federal laws. Now the situation is quite different. Through the new law’s mandates, regulatory powers and reform, health insurance is and will be largely a government activity which will have an ever larger jurisdiction over how doctors practice, make clinical judgments and are paid.

The new law provides for about 150 new government agencies, many of which are designed to be ‘oversight’ bureaucracies which will have the right to decide what medical care is legal to provide through insurance. Among other things, they will have the right to review my medical care of you and read your medical record. Now, as soon as you submit our economic transaction to your insurance company for reimbursement, you have involved me in these regulations and put me in the jurisdiction of government for my activities, decisions and behavior as your doctor.

No one can have two masters. Either I can serve you as my patient or I can serve the government. Either I can continue to make your welfare and health my only concern, including the protection of your privacy and medical records, or I can abide by ever-increasing amounts of government regulations and dictates to my decisions. I can’t do both. I choose to continue to follow my conscience and practice medicine to serve you.

For this reason, I am responding to the situation created by this new law by exercising Read more

March 24, 2010

Historian Robert Higgs: “Citizen, be careful what you wish for; the government just might give it to you good and hard.”

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Nothing Outside the State

by Robert Higgs

A popular slogan of the Italian Fascists under Mussolini was, “Tutto nello Stato, niente al di fuori dello Stato, nulla contro lo Stato” (everything for the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state). I recall this expression frequently as I observe the state’s far-reaching penetration of my own society.

What of any consequence remains beyond the state’s reach in the United States today? Not wages, working conditions, or labor-management relations; not health care; not money, banking, or financial services; not personal privacy; not transportation or communication; not education or scientific research; not farming or food supply; not nutrition or food quality; not marriage or divorce; not child care; not provision for retirement; not recreation; not insurance of any kind; not smoking or drinking; not gambling; not political campaign funding or publicity; not real estate development, house construction, or housing finance; not international travel, trade, or finance; not a thousand other areas and aspects of social life.

One might affirm that the state still keeps its hands off religion, but it actually does not. It certifies certain religious organizations as legitimate and condemns others, as many young men discovered to their sorrow when they attempted to claim the status of conscientious objector during the Vietnam War. It assigns members of certain religions, but not members of others, as chaplains in its armed services.

Besides, isn’t statism itself a religion for most Americans? Do they not honor the state above all else, above even the commandments of a conventional religion they may embrace? If their religion tells them “thou shalt not murder,” but the state orders them to murder, then they murder. If the state tells them to rob, to destroy property, and to imprison innocent people, then, notwithstanding any religious strictures, they rob, destroy property, and imprison innocent people, as millions of victims of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and millions of victims of the so-called Drug War in this country will attest. Moreover, in every form of adversity, Americans look to the state for their personal salvation, just as before the twentieth century their ancestors looked Read more

March 21, 2010

SplendorQuest: Redemption is egoism in action: Even if other people are criminal, I am not — but I will not cause them to become good by becoming a criminal myself.

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

I wrote this a dozen years ago, and I’ve posted it here before. It’s apposite today, because, to all indications, we are all about to be involuntarily inducted into a cannibal cult. My question for you: Will you choose to be devoured by your neighbors, or will you elect to devour them instead? –GSS

 
What I want to discuss is Socrates’ question about whether it is better to inflict an injury or to have an injury inflicted upon you. It’s a favorite of sophists and sophomores, I know, but I think it strikes at the very core of justice. The justice I seek and seek to defend is not “out there”, apart from myself. Justice (or injustice) is not what others do to me, it’s what I do to myself and to others. Where I find myself availing myself of the fallacies tu quoque or two wrongs make a right, I am rationalizing injustice, and the worst havoc I am wreaking is upon my own ego.

The Nazarene’s answer to Socrates was this: It is better to have an injury inflicted upon you, because redemption is still possible to one who has not inflicted injury upon another. I don’t believe in an afterlife and I don’t believe redemption hinges upon any one event. But I do believe that a “justice” that is itself unjust is vain at best and evil at worst.

We can make a joke by saying, “Political philosophy is the means by which ethical systems betray themselves.” There are actually a host of reasons for this, and all of them are amusing to me. For one, a political system has a meta-goal apart from the ethical system in which it is rooted: It must function in the real world.

Moreover, the political system itself has a meta-ethical or even extra-ethical goal in that its proponents will tend to imbue it with what they view are essential survival characteristics even if these betray the ethical system in which the political philosophy is putatively based. Any form of argument that the polity can or should or must do what it would be immoral or Read more

March 20, 2010

So there’s this huge interent scandal at the NAR, except there are no details about why it’s a scandal, and the “researchers” behind the claims are keeping their names secret. Want to know more? All you have to do is cough up twenty bucks a month.

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Do you want potent evidence that the #RTB movement has nothing to do with actually raising standards of service and care among Realtors? The organizers of the so-called Raising The Bar push did not try to enlist our support here, even though BloodhoundBlog is by far the loudest voice on the net on the subject of real estate professionals bringing better value to consumers.

In the same respect, I am deeply suspicious of putative anti-NAR movements that do not contact us. This is the philosophical home of the idea of supplanting the NAR. Doing anything to undermine the real estate vampire cartel without us is a non-starter.

So I didn’t know, at first, what to make of NARScandal.com, a web site that spammed me this afternoon. I tried reading the articles, but they’re all implication with no actual details. The word “scandal” is thrown about liberally, but I saw no evidence of anything even remotely like a scandal on the site.

As an example, the implication is that RPR is some kind of evil scheme concocted by arch-villains like Dale Stinton — who goes about cleverly camouflaged as a fat old dotard to confound his enemies. I’m a beta tester for RPR, and I can tell you with confidence that RPR is reasonably interesting as yet another Realty.bot and extremely boring as the lynchpin of a conspiracy plot. Do not ever expect me to say anything good about the NAR, but RPR, for what I’ve seen of it, is tapioca in technicolor, no threat to anyone, not even to Zillow or Trulia.

So where’s the scandal? Moreover, who is the scandal-monger? I dug all through the site — and its whois record — and could not find anyone willing to stand up on his hind legs and claim to be the creator of the site or the author of all the going-nowhere “exposés.” One could argue that Stinton and other NAR poohbahs have a libel claim, except that nothing potentially libelous — or even interesting — is published at the site.

So I kept digging and finally came to this:

Of course…

The NAR is a criminal conspiracy Read more

March 19, 2010

Noble savages not so noble? “There are all these aspects to our lives that just seem to work, because we are not actually baboons.”

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

We have been cursed, as a civilization, because so much of the social sciences side of the university quadrangle has for so long been in the thrall of Marxism. It has been difficult for intellectuals to see the world for what it is, so avidly have they sought to portray it as the product of their preconceptions. Nothing changes quickly, but it is nice to see academics actually testing their theories in reality, rather than just blathering on out of prejudice.

Why am I in such a celebratory mood? Anthropologists in Canada have discovered that the so-called “noble savage” is quite a bit less than noble, while the much maligned greedy capitalists of the West are in fact kinder, gentler, more trusting people. This is the sort of thing that should be obvious to anyone with eyes, but it takes an effort, apparently, to get a social scientist to take note of the territory instead of insisting on the sacred validity of the truth presented by the map.

From Canada’s National Post:

Free-enterprising, impersonal markets may seem cutthroat and mean-spirited, but a provocative new study says markets have been a force for good over the last 10,000 years, helping to drive the evolution of more trusting and co-operative societies.

“We live in a much kinder, gentler world than most humans have lived in,” says anthropologist Joe Henrich of the University of British Columbia, lead author of the study that helps topple long-held stereotypes.

The finding, reported in the journal Science, suggests people trust and play fair with strangers because markets and religion — not some deep psychological instinct inherited from our dim tribal past — have helped shape our neural circuitry over the eons.

More:

The study found that the likelihood that people “played fair” with strangers increased with the degree people were integrated into markets and participated in a world religion. Participants in the larger-scale societies were also more likely to punish players who did not play fair.

The hunter-gatherer and tribal societies studied are known for sharing among family and close acquaintances. But the researchers found fair play in monetary transactions with strangers was almost an alien Read more

March 16, 2010

SplendorQuest: Xavier’s destiny

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

A Ramblin’ Gamblin’ Willie story

“Madre de dios…!”

Mrs. Marquez said that, and it seemed a fair estimate to me. Everywhere we looked in the overlit room we saw things of wonder and beauty and uncontested menace. Despite the din, I heard myself groan, and I wasn’t utterly sure I’d done the right thing. Walking through the valley of the shadow of death in a grade school cafeteria is one thing. Pushing an underfed eight-year-old boychild ahead of you is another.

The road I walk is the path that separates the straights from the crooks, the pencil-fine line that splits the people we call “decent” from the sneaks, the freaks and the side-show geeks. I have a scruple or two, painted and waxed, so I don’t quite fit in among the bungled and the botched. And yet I do have an itinerary, and I don’t have much of an agenda, so the quality folk are never dismayed to see the back of me. Neither fish nor fowl, always on the prowl, quick to resign from any community that would even consider having me as a member. This is the life I’ve chosen for myself, after all, and I’d be daft to beef about it.

Still, there are Other Matters to consider. Among them: I’ve been nineteen-years-old forever, but I’ve been nineteen for a lot of years. I’m making a buck or two more than I ever have before, and staying in one spot a day or two — or a week or two, or a month or two — is not only more desirable than it ever was before, it’s suddenly financially possible where it never was before. Plus which, I don’t love the cold and I do love the sweet smell of orange blossoms. And to make a belabored excuse slightly less laborious, I’ll just come out with it: I hung out in a half-big town halfway from nowhere for so long that I got myself well and truly hooked in a scheme straight out of the handbook of the straights.

I was renting week-to-week at the Orangeview Estates, and my next-door neighbors in the Read more

March 3, 2010

Computer “expert” insists, in 1995, that, “No online database will replace your daily newspaper, no CD-ROM can take the place of a competent teacher and no computer network will change the way government works.”

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Technology “expert” Clifford Stoll precisely 15 years ago in Newsweek:

After two decades online, I’m perplexed. It’s not that I haven’t had a gas of a good time on the Internet. I’ve met great people and even caught a hacker or two. But today, I’m uneasy about this most trendy and oversold community. Visionaries see a future of telecommuting workers, interactive libraries and multimedia classrooms. They speak of electronic town meetings and virtual communities. Commerce and business will shift from offices and malls to networks and modems. And the freedom of digital networks will make government more democratic.

Baloney. Do our computer pundits lack all common sense? The truth in no online database will replace your daily newspaper, no CD-ROM can take the place of a competent teacher and no computer network will change the way government works.

Consider today’s online world. The Usenet, a worldwide bulletin board, allows anyone to post messages across the nation. Your word gets out, leapfrogging editors and publishers. Every voice can be heard cheaply and instantly. The result? Every voice is heard. The cacophony more closely resembles citizens band radio, complete with handles, harassment, and anonymous threats. When most everyone shouts, few listen. How about electronic publishing? Try reading a book on disc. At best, it’s an unpleasant chore: the myopic glow of a clunky computer replaces the friendly pages of a book. And you can’t tote that laptop to the beach. Yet Nicholas Negroponte, director of the MIT Media Lab, predicts that we’ll soon buy books and newspapers straight over the Internet. Uh, sure.

Wicked stupid, huh? It gets better:

Then there’s cyberbusiness. We’re promised instant catalog shopping—just point and click for great deals. We’ll order airline tickets over the network, make restaurant reservations and negotiate sales contracts. Stores will become obsolete. So how come my local mall does more business in an afternoon than the entire Internet handles in a month? Even if there were a trustworthy way to send money over the Internet—which there isn’t—the network is missing a most essential ingredient of capitalism: salespeople.

It’s interesting to me to note that the predictions Stoll is denouncing were Read more

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Inventing Real Estate 2.0

Welcome to BloodhoundBlog, the national real estate industry marketing and technology weblog written by, for and about real estate professionals. Better yet, welcome to the wired world of real estate. We are busily inventing Real Estate 2.0 – technology, marketing, service and salesmanship. Like all Bloodhounds, we are smart, frisky and fiercely independent. We've built a spot on the earth – beloved over all – where each one of us can be who we are, no matter who that might be. We are committed to an idea of excellence that will flush the bums, the con-men and the crybabies out of the real estate industry. If you yearn to have your failures excused, your moral lapses absolved or your boo-boos kissed, seek elsewhere. But if you are sick to death of mediocrity – welcome home. Read all about us, subscribe to our feed and steel yourself for the hunt. We work hard, we play hard, we learn everything we can – and we bow to no one.

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